Friday, March 2, 2012

Too Young, Too Soon

A GOOD man gone and far too soon. Andrew Breitbart, the American New Media entrepreneur who exposed the New Establishment with wit, vigour and bravery, has died at the age of just 43.

This is genuinely distressing news, and it hits all the harder in Australia, where the smug, self-protecting circle of media commentators, academic careerists and nakedly manipulative "public interest" groups hijack and dominate so much of what professional wankers like Robert Manne like to call "the national conversation." Looking at the wounds Breitbart inflicted on Acorn, Planned Parenthood and the hustlers quick to smear the Tea Party as racists because they could not address its objections to state-sponsored waste and hypocrisy, the hope at the Billabong was that his puckish campaigns would inspire something similar on this side of the Pacific.

16 comments:

How come I have never heard of this bloke? He is me. I don't care about issues, I care that people are consistent with them across both sides of politics, and don't pick up and put down their issues depending on who is in government (and usually to keep in solid with the so-called trendy crowd).

Precisely. Without people like Breitbart to hold the New Establishment's feet to the fire, we end up with David Marr loves Jonathan Holmes loves Laura Tingle loves everyone who works at Fairfax loves etc etc.

They stand in a circle telling each other that it is not ideas that are important, it is membership in their tight little, pinata-whacking group. You don't have to be smart (Andrew Jaspan), you don't need integrity (Jonathan Holmes), you don't need to be professionally competent (Wendy Carlisle). You just need to agree that all other members of your circle are oh-so-smart and everyone else is shouted down.

Bunyip,The circle isn't confined to the media. There is an entire class of people whose status and identity are tied up with self-identifying as being part of a smarter and more moral group.

Try talking to a bureaucrat with a mickey mouse Masters in Macrame. A self-identified actor or artist behind a coffee machine. An inner city graphic designer. Or worse: someone with a serious postgrad degree who isn't quite smart enough to realise the limitations of abstract intelligence and rationalised models.

The biggest problem of all though, are ministerial staffers on both sides of politics. Too young to have yet lost hubris, identity tied up in being informed insiders, never been spanked by a project gone wrong, not quite mature enough to run against fashionable thinking.

I know them; I work with them; they are the real face of government failure and Hayek's Fatal Conceit.

His achievements have shown exactly what power the internet and free speech combined can exert. With, of course, the sort of energy, tenacity and imagination Breitbart had. Add sites like WattsUp and Jo Nova and the future of accountability is promising - in the long term.

Anyone who has tried knows it is extremely difficult to get the truth about bureaucracies and insider networks into the public eye. Even if the facts are commonly known and gossiped about among insiders.

Breitbart did it with style.

Oh, and note that in NSW we couldn't do the same thing. Currently illegal for one member of a conversation to record and publish it - where are the media activists on that one?

"He was the modern conservative iteration of a 1960's radical" - Jonah Goldberg is right - it is now radical to be conservative. But as long as there are people capable of learning, they'll grow out of youthful leftish radicalism and find the true path.

The damage from the loss of Andrew Breitbart cannot be over-estimated. It is huge but at least the ‘Bigs’ and other American free spirits, PJ media and the rest of the new media can carry on under American diversity and the protection of the First Amendment.

Australians not only have no such constitutional protection but, rather, an ALP/Green government coalition which is fully capable of denying even the spirit of free speech in a blink of an eye and even have their Pravda media report to hang its hat if it so chooses.

The Breitbart example has to be created, honed, continued in Australia and without the trendsetter as a guide this will be more difficult if the forces of darkness have a mind to place their Goebbels-like censorious hand over established and online Australian media.

Some things must never be lost and whilst some great quotes are there to represent Andrew Breitbart now - eg from Chesterton: “We are to regard existence as a raid or great adventure; it is to be judged, therefore, not by what calamities it encounters, but by what flag it follows and what high town it assaults”. Or, better still, markedly in his own words:-

“The army of the emboldened and gleefully ill-informed is growing. Groupthink happens and we have to take it head-on. We can’t win the political war until we win the cultural war. The Frankfurt School knew that – that’s why they won the cultural war and then, on its back, the political war. We can do the same but we have to be willing to enter the arena.

“I had never been willing to stand out there and be the object of public ridicule. I had feared what it would be like, feared what retribution would come, feared what the social consternation would be, feared what the swords and slings and the arrows and the rocks upon my body would feel like………...And now, walking out of the Maher show, I realised that what I had feared most –expulsion and derision – didn’t really even hurt, not when you were standing up for what you believe…….”

And this, the most important of all

“Feeling the thrill of sending a message to these people that we reject their worldview the way they reject ours.”